3/3/09

The article, "Harvard Medical School in Ethics Quandary," tap dances around the issue in a variety of ways. For reasons that we cannot fathom, the writers and editors of the Times simply do not want to use the "c" word to describe behavior of the faculty of that med school. No doubt though, what the article chronicles is pure and simple corruption.

Faculty are paid handsomely by the drug companies and, in turn, the professors give to the snake oil salesmen the imprimatur of "Harvard" -- the world's leading education brand.

The example that kicks off the Times' story tells of students who instead of receiving unbiased medical training from their instructors, are now subjected to infomercials for drug companies masquerading as course lectures.

In the scenario, the professor blows off a student who asks about why cholesterol drugs cause a significant number of people to become sick. Turns out -- he's been paid by the cholesterol drug companies to deflect such questioning.

Whoops. That is the definition of corruption in any dictionary -- students who are paying for real training -- instead are given worthless infomercials.

Aren't there racketeering statutes that cover this kind of conspiracy?

BOSTON — In a first-year pharmacology class at Harvard Medical School, Matt Zerden grew wary as the professor promoted the benefits of cholesterol drugs and seemed to belittle a student who asked about side effects.

Mr. Zerden later discovered something by searching online that he began sharing with his classmates. The professor was not only a full-time member of the Harvard Medical faculty, but a paid consultant to 10 drug companies, including five makers of cholesterol treatments.

“I felt really violated,” Mr. Zerden, now a fourth-year student, recently recalled. “Here we have 160 open minds trying to learn the basics in a protected space, and the information he was giving wasn’t as pure as I think it should be.”

Mr. Zerden’s minor stir four years ago has lately grown into a full-blown movement by more than 200 Harvard Medical School students and sympathetic faculty, intent on exposing and curtailing the industry influence in their classrooms and laboratories, as well as in Harvard’s 17 affiliated teaching hospitals and institutes.

They say they are concerned that the same money that helped build the school’s world-class status may in fact be hurting its reputation and affecting its teaching.

The students argue, for example, that Harvard should be embarrassed by the F grade it recently received from the American Medical Student Association, a national group that rates how well medical schools monitor and control drug industry money.

Harvard Medical School’s peers received much higher grades, ranging from the A for the University of Pennsylvania, to B’s received by Stanford, Columbia and New York University, to the C for Yale... more racketeering news...